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Why are Mormons so . . .

A recent article at Slate described blogger Renee DiResta’s idea of looking at what people think of different states by typing the question beginning “Why is [state] so” into Google and checking what the top autocomplete search suggestions were. I thought it might be fun to try this with religions.

I used pretty much the same approach as DiResta: I typed “Why are [religion members] so” into Google and checked the autocomplete search suggestions. Google gave me up to ten suggestions per religion. The number varied, though, with some religions (e.g., Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Seventh-day Adventists) turning up no autocomplete suggestions at all. In some cases, the same result appeared more than once for the same religion because of alternative spellings (for example, judgmental and judgemental) or suggested search terms in addition to the key adjective (for example, “Why are Buddhists so happy” and “Why are Buddhists so happy picture”). In the lists below, I’ve gone ahead and listed the duplicates but dropped the extra search terms and the alternative spellings.

To summarize the autocomplete suggestions, I first rated each one as positive (+1), neutral (0), or negative (-1). When you look at the lists of suggestions, you’ll see that this wasn’t as difficult or arbitrary as it might sound. Most suggestions were either clearly positive or clearly negative. In the lists below, I’ve put words I counted as positive in blue and words I counted as negative in red. The neutral ones are in plain old black.

After rating the suggestions, I weighted them according to their order, with the first receiving 10 points, the second 9, and so on down to the last (if it was present) receiving 1 point. I multiplied the rating by the weight for each suggestion. If the first suggestion was positive, for example, this counted as a +10. If the second and third were negative, they counted as -9 and -8. Finally, I added up the products of the ratings and weights to give an overall score for how positive or negative the suggestions were for a particular religion.

Okay, after all that, you probably want me to just get to the lists already. I’ll start with Mormons and then skip around to other religious groups that I thought might be interesting to check.

Pretty much the same level of negative suggestions. I also tried Agnostics, but got no autocomplete suggestions.

Looking at all the suggestions, I have to say that I am shocked at how positively this study suggests people view Mormons. I remember the Pew survey of Americans done last fall that found that more people thought of a negative word than a positive word when asked for a one-word description of the Mormon religion. Before checking, I thought this approach would yield a result something like that study did. Maybe this means people actually are viewing Mormons in a more positive light, but it seems more likely that the difference is simply evidence that this method (if you can even call it that) isn’t capturing anything meaningful.

On that topic, I know there are a bunch of reasons to mistrust the results. Some are related to the question stem. One problem is that “Why are [religion members] so” is leading. It leads more obviously toward a negative word than a positive one. I wonder if it also might not be skewed to favor religions that English-speaking Google users know less about. Perhaps for such religions, people are more likely to complete the question stem with a positive word because they’re genuinely curious. For the better known religions, perhaps people are more venting their frustration than asking genuine questions they want answered. Another possible problem with the question stem is that it was arbitrarily chosen. People likely also search for information about religions using many other question forms (“Why are [religion members]”, “Why do [religion members]”, etc.).

You could also argue that the autocomplete suggestions are just spitting back stereotypes: Catholics are guilty, Buddhists are happy, and Jews are cheap. This appears to be true in some cases, but for Mormons, are these really common stereotypes? Mormons are pretty?

The scoring method is also arbitrary. You could argue that the weights shouldn’t decline linearly as you go through the list. Google is also increasingly customizing results depending on where you are when you search and what you’ve searched for in the past. It may be that my results are unique to me.

I’d love to hear your interpretations or criticisms or results of your replications if you want to try this with Google yourself.

That’s fascinating. I was inspired to play around with a few other phrases.

“Mormons are”
Mormons are crazy
Mormons are not Christians
Mormons are Christians
Mormons are a cult
Mormons aren’t Christians
Mormons are creepy
Mormons are racist
Mormons are nuts
Mormons are morons
Mormons are hot

Lots of places I lived growing up people only knew a few Mormons, so I remember hearing/being asked about Mormons being pretty (there were two Mormon families with pretty teen girls at one of my schools) and Mormons being rich/successful (that was at a school school was kind of a rich suburban school….of course our ward had a country more redneck school and inner city poor schools but people at my school didn’t see that).

I was unfamiliar with the Mormons and magnets thing. Apparently it’s an internet trolling meme that has taken off. People would talk to the internet missionaries and then at the end ask “how do magnets work?” and of course the kids manning the computers at the MTC didn’t know. It was just a trollish way to mess with them that has caught on. (But I think it has happened so many times now that the internet missionaries actually have a canned response to that question!)

I’m a little ashamed to know this off the top of my head, but Kevin Barney’s answer isn’t quite complete. The origin of the magnet question to troll online missionaries is this inane Insane Clown Posse song, which at one point asks how magnets work.

Also, I’ve seen a bunch of those “let’s troll the Mormon missionaries” chats and I have to admit some of them are pretty funny. Bringing up Jesse Knight and asking how he worked (because he was a mining magnate)? Clever.

Chanson, thanks for the pointer. Chino’s Venn diagram in particular is pure awesomeness! It’s also really interesting that there were so many positive autocomplete suggestions for Mormons even in 2010. That suggests that this isn’t just a Mormon moment thing. Or if it is, then the Mormon moment has been longer than I thought.

This is fascinating, Ziff. I wouldn’t have expected nearly so many positive results for Mormons, either, but I think your ideas about why that’s the case are good ones. (And it makes me sad to look at the results for the other religions, which frankly say more about the asker than members of the religion in question.)

I’m not surprised that “pretty” is on there, and I think it has more to do with grooming than actual physical attractiveness. Missionaries are all clean-cut and smiley and dressed up much nicer than your average young people. BYU students are the same (to a certain extent). MoTab, the General Authorities, anyone who might be a public face for the church–they’re all pretty trim and tidy. There’s a lot of Stepford-type emphasis on looking a certain way in our culture, and I think that’s probably more what people mean when they think of Mormons as pretty.

Sounds more like a PR thing than accurate data. For some reason the ‘I’m a Mormon’ campaign led to an onslaught of members familiarizing themselves with the internet. Maybe if you did the Amish that would help neglect any results skewed by members themselves.

The first link for me was to a neutral ‘Amish Facts’ followed by ‘weird’.

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